MICHAEL KALMBACH MOBILE SEPT...
Michael KalmbachMOBILE
September 10 - November 06, 2004
Michael Kalmbach’s first exhibition at Wohnmaschine reveals a further development in Kalmbach’s sculptural oeuvre. Whereas until now the artist has worked with materials like plaster and clay, for the installation Mobile he created papier-mâché figures from wire and paper.
The leading figure, the “little hero,” whom Kalmbach first called into being in his text Kleiner Pinsel (Little brush) and the watercolor series Der große and der kleine Paul, appears again in Mobile, but now in three-dimensional form. One large and several small bodies that recall planets hang between the figures from the ceiling. From one crater on the largest of the planetlike spheres, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria Shriver, is seen laughing into space.
Associations with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince come immediately to mind, but Kalmbach gives his hero a different character: indecorous, vomiting as he follows his smaller fellow creatures with his mouth wide open ready to eat; in the watercolors he wreaks havoc. The mobile is a construction that sets a world of images in motion.
The abysses of this exhibition’s spectacle are revealed only on closer inspection. Our first, innocent gaze is sullied by the details of the depiction and the choice of materials; for example, the use of newspaper points to a social connection; the use of toilet paper, to various bodily fluids. Mobile is a playful experiment with human appetites.
In addition to the installation the exhibition includes a selection of watercolors that continue the world of the “little hero.” Dreamlike aspects are captured on paper; weightlessness seems to become a universal state.
“Kalmbach’s figures betray dependencies, reveal helplessness and vulnerability, richness of invention and cleverness, and they seem to be subject to a destiny. They do not lack a certain comic effect – like that of life itself.”
– Christian Müller, in Michael Kalmbach: Menschensuppe, trans. Margret Powell-Joss, exh. cat. Museum für Gegenwartskunst der öffentlichen Kunstsammlungen Basel and the Emanuel Hoffmann Stiftung (Basel, 2002).
The catalogue Michael Kalmbach – Zeichnungen, Skulpturen und Installationen, ed. by Erik Stephan for Städtische Museen Jena, 2004 is available.
ISBN 3-930128-64-0